Our search into the meaning and importance of imagery begins with drawings in a cave from some 31,000 years ago at Chauvet. Clearly these are not graffiti or random daubings to pass time, they are indeed skilled representations of dangerous animals with the odd human figure. Various dots and animal figures at Lascaux have been said by some, including an astronomer, to represent constellations and stars. Perhaps partly in order to investigate the authenticity of this find people from various disciplines were invited to view the cave paintings including anthropologists, artists and scientists. One sculptor notes how carefully the surface was prepared and how a particular cave was used, whilst another in the same complex might have been equally suitable contained no such paintings at all. It all points to a great deal of organisation. Whatever we might think the artists who produced this work were not primitive, they were intelligent people with vision who could see ahead in their efforts to overcome problems. They would certainly have had a far different mind set to our own and for that reason alone the problems of discovering the purpose of these paintings are considerable. For example the extender for the pigments in these works was not water but baryte and potassium feldspar. How else would they still be fresh to the eye even today. The great problem of conserving the cave paintings at Lascaux has been the ingress of people wanting to look.

Commonly held wisdom has long suggested that these paintings were nothing other than shamanistic efforts for attracting good hunting. That does seem have its problems though. For one the animals depicted for the most part were not part of the local diet and deer which was, is not shown at all. If such paintings were the work of a shaman then wouldn't you expect to see them in various locations demanded by the hunt? There is of course another considerable problem arising from the Chauvet discovery. Modern man is thought to have found his way into what we now call Europe around 30,000 or so years ago and these paintings are of the same period. There is no discovery to suggest a necessary building up of skills, just the evidence to suggest that an organised society quite suddenly appeared on the scene.

We could spend a great deal of time discussing what these paintings might not be and never arrive at the important conclusion as to what they really were. It is apparent that they were not the effort of some local artist, either passing time, finding self expression or making a living from them. They were part of a much greater scheme of things.

All good academics like to have solid evidence on which to build a hypothesis but there is very little of use in this part of France. The one significant thing we do know is that this time was the end of an ice age. Temperatures were rising and this location was becoming inhabitable by people from farther south. Another bit of commonly held wisdom says these people would have been hunter gatherers with no agricultural knowledge.

So here we are trying to decide why image making should be so important to these people with scarcely a shred of evidence. Neither do we have a hope of entering their mind set to truly understand their thinking. Conjecture may be the best thing on offer. True we can examine what seem to be similar societies of the present time, but I wouldn't want to bet on that for any sound conclusion. The caves at Chauvet and Lascaux were surely on such a scale to suggest a cathedral like importance. Whether for mobile hunter gatherers or an agricultural people they had to be centres of considerable importance.

A rather negative piece of evidence is that they didn't have writing so would want to record events. But these paintings are not apparently of specific events. They might have wanted to record hunting kills for the time of year but it would be rather a grand gesture for such a simple purpose. Most historical records would be held by tribes in memory and passed on verbally.

If we can now think in terms of logic and what we do know the image is powerful because it does not require the same thinking as spoken or written language. There need not be the same filters which prevent direct communication with the emotions. The response is often instant and instinctive. As Marshall McLuhan said the medium is the message.

Now I'm going off to have another think about this and you might want to join me.

Mike Fone

Posted by Kim at 7:38 pm